Dear Editor,
I want to share so many things but will limit myself to the promise of the future and the threat of today. The former is about education and our young ones, while the latter is about the COVID-19 pandemic and all of us, without exception. I start with the inspiring.
Here are the little ones, not yet in their teens, and already excelling under the most demanding circumstances. I hail Rovin Lall (no relation) and Samuel Barkoye. Well done! Lads. The future beckons with great challenges and many good things; go ahead boldly and conquer the mountains that stand. I say the same things to Alexander Singh in third place (The Marian Academy), and all those others, who did exceptionally well, whether from public or private institutions of learning. They are still way young in years, and I believe once and forever students.
Editor, it does feel sparklingly refreshing to write about youth and education (and not the evils and evildoers that wrench our land). That these youngsters (Lianna Dharampaul, Brandon Ramdin, Danash Tularam, Gabriel Felix, Britney Peters, Charisma Etwaroo, Salmah Bacchus, Yuki Clarke, and Robert Forrester) rose above the occasion of unique circumstances and delivered is testimony to concentration and dedication and application. It certainly brings good feeling, a ray of light, that even COVID-19 could not thwart them nor mar their singular efforts. Congratulations to all.
In the next instance, I am troubled-and deeply so-by developments in Guyana relative to the pandemic. First, the facts, as known. A week does not pass, without scores of new confirmed cases being reported a couple of times, and now with seeming monotonous regularity. There are deaths, too; though always regrettable, they are thankfully not in any alarming numbers. But there is severe danger, what I hesitate to label potentially catastrophic confluences. For, there was a leading medical professional going public to articulate that if the number of new confirmed cases continue at the rate that they have been occurring, then Guyana’s medical system could collapse, as in “break.”
Editor, that is frightening to hear, worse to consider as to its implications, the full reach of its consequences. I would have preferred to see and hear our departed and incoming authorities sharing intelligence and commonsense intuitions (gained from the rough trenches of experience) rather than take umbrage at each other. Currently, the citizens of this country need tempered and concentrated minds, from top to bottom, to find a way to stand in unified approach to combat what looms as an existential threat. Instead, there is the dreariness of cross talking and finger pointing that layers a local political pandemic on a growing medical one. It is a measure of my distaste for ‘political’ and its Guyanese practitioners, almost without fail, that I consider it the dirtiest of words in the national lexicon. Even when we are sick or dying, or close to being, there is bickering and backbiting and bringing down.
When we need all hands at the wheel for a concerted fight, we have not a country waging war together, but a circus with a cohort of clowns preening and jostling for cheap points. Worse yet, there is the spectre of a system rupturing and mortuaries overflowing, and Guyanese leaders revel in their unending Titanic moment. The people need them, but the priority of their urgencies is how good and smooth they appear, and how poor and shabby they make adversaries look.
Though it is sure to fall on deaf ears and hardened minds, I think it is time to cut the damn nonsense. Let us have a sober and sensible approach that cuts out the squabbling and strategize on how to give our hardworking medical people the help and comfort they desperately need. I call on leaders, I demand of all of them, that they put personal and party interests on the back burner and figure out how to get ahead of what hovers over our heads. There is a storm brewing. How do we minimize the soaking feared?
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
